Happy Birthday
by angel-death-dealer
Summary: Three years after being hit by a staggering loss, Clint and Natasha finally come together to say the words they've been holding back.


The bed is wet when Clint wakes up. Not the whole bed, just the part of the sheet where his hand is resting as it's draped over her hip. He isn't sure what's woken him at first, but it doesn't take long for him to work it out, even though it takes a long moment for his sleep-addled brain to put the pieces together. Natasha's shaking, really trembling beyond control, almost vibrating in a way that convinces him there's a terribly made carbon copy of her lying beside him until he realises that this isn't a normal nightmare. It's not even a nightmare. She isn't asleep, but she's definitely not awake enough to know what's going on. Her eyes are barely open, unfocused, desperate, and the arm that was once resting over his, enclosing them together in their rest, is now pressing down so firmly on her stomach she looks like she might burst through it, which is why his hand had fallen down onto the sheet...the wet sheet...

He feels like he's watching himself move from outside his own body as he tears away the bed sheets that are thrown haphazardly over them. They're still only in their underwear after a night spent together in his bed on the helicarrier and against the steel grey sheet they're lying on he can instantly see the reason for her agony. Blood. The sheet is tainted with so much blood it looks like she's had her throat slit but the stain is too far down for it to be her throat. Shaking hands check over every inch of her skin for injury until his hands join hers over her stomach and he...knows. He just knows at that moment. The pieces of the puzzle slide into place and his stomach drops so quickly it drags his heart down along with it.

His voice trembles as he whispers her name, pressing his face into her neck for a moment which a pained whine that he's never heard from his own lips before, not even when his parents died when he was a child, because this is worse than anything he's ever felt before. That sounds breaks his own hear more than the fact that Natasha is barely making any sound except for gasping breaths against the pain, and he realises with an agonising shattering of his heart that she doesn't know what's happening.

"Nat, we gotta go," he tells her, his voice distant as he struggles to block out the facts just enough to do what needs to be done. "Come on, we're going now."

He gets out of the bed to find her clothes, a robe, anything to cover her dignity with, and ends up carefully sliding one of his own sweaters over her. It dangles past her hips but she doesn't adjust it or play with the hem like she sometimes did. She barely notices it against her bare skin until he has to physically remove her hands from her stomach to put them through the sleeves and this makes her cry out and her eyes screw shut. It's only when he goes to find clothes for himself when he realises that his boxers are dripping with the blood, but the tendrils of it dripping down onto his thighs are nothing compared to the puddle she's now sitting in.

Four hours later, the only infirmary assistant they trust to treat them has been sworn to secrecy of Natasha's presence there, and confirms what Clint already knows. She's miscarried their child in the night. They snuck into a civilian hospital under false names only yesterday morning and had conned themselves into a free check-up for her. Natasha was nineteen weeks pregnant, still barely showing because she'd kept up her exercise and strict diet, and she was told by the nurse on staff that it would take a while to come into her stomach properly because it was her first pregnancy. Clint had noticed for the first time that day, as she lay back for the scan and he stared through misty eyes at the computer image of a baby-type thing that actually did have the shape of his nose, and even Natasha's eyes are close to tears when they're told it's a boy.

But he's taken from them already, and he isn't sure if Natasha fully processed the words of the infirmary assistant before the sedation sends her to sleep. She took a shuddering breath as they told her, but Clint didn't even attempt to hide the tears that rolled down his face at the knowledge. Their son had died. Their baby. And he'd never even gotten a chance to try and protect him.

He goes back to his room where they'd been sleeping before what they would later refer to as 'the incident', and takes everything covered in blood to the incinerator; the sheets, the underwear they'd both been wearing, even the damn mattress is tossed into the fire to be destroyed. But there's a spot on the floor that fell from one of them that he can't scrub away and it's that one spot that dissolves him to tears on the bedroom floor.

Because he knows that it will never be the same again.

Natasha never remembers that night. She doesn't remember Clint dressing her, checking her for injury, carrying her to the infirmary and shouting orders around as if she'd been shot in the chest. She doesn't remember the blood, or how it felt, or even being in pain. She doesn't remember any of it before waking up under the sedation and Clint at her side. She hates the sedation, hates the numbness and the drugs, and wants to scream that she shouldn't be sedated because she's pregnant...and that's the moment that it hits her, the same moment where she meets Clint's eyes and he reaches for her hand. The touch of his skin on hers merges too much with a cramp in her stomach that's familiar, but not one she's felt for several months and she knows then that her baby is gone.

She goes back to her own room when she's released from the infirmary. She can't stand to go back to his room and as much as he tries to give her some space to grieve, he still sneaks to her in the dead of night and crawls into her bed with her. Neither of them want to sleep in the room where their child left them, and it only takes a matter of days for all Clint's possessions to join her own in her room...their room. His room is taken by a new recruit, but Clint tortures him relentlessly because the rookie can only complain about the lack of natural light being let in and Clint wants to force him against a wall and tell him about the darkness that really takes hold of that room.

But they tell no one. No one knew that they were expecting. No one knew that it was supposed to be their way out of SHIELD, that they were going to use the scan photo that Natasha hid away but never destroyed to get Fury to release them from their services. They had money, a house on the outskirts of Chicago with their names on, and they were going to leave this world behind and start new. But no one knew that besides themselves. So no one knew when it was taken away.

Natasha took her anti-biotics, went to each of the carefully scheduled and undocumented checks afterwards and they doubled their efforts in birth control after. After several months of withdrawing emotionally from him, she allowed her partner back into her heart and it was six months after their loss that they finally grieved for their lost child together – Christmas Eve, when they should have been in their new home, with their new baby, but that house was still empty and they were still SHIELD agents.

Nothing changed.

Only everything had changed.

Anniversaries were hard. Not the anniversary of the loss, but the day he would be born. September 11th. They grieved heavily that day, but never together. They allowed each other the space they needed because they needed the distractions and it was easy to hide their pain in the day of remembrance where it blended in so easily with the united grief of a nation.

The first anniversary Natasha volunteers herself for a month-long mission in Cairo, and Clint drinks himself into oblivion and very nearly confesses to Steve why it is he's trying to book a ticket to Alexandria because he simply has to be with Natasha the next morning and he can't possibly explain to Steve why. The second anniversary Clint's unconscious the entire time, he doesn't wake up until two days after because of an injury sustained in the field. He doesn't expect Natasha to be at his side when he wakes up, but her eyes are tinted read and he's not sure if it's because of the date that he missed or the possibility of losing him too, but he realises for the first time that he's not the only one that thinks about the place that they should be.

He notices it more then, when he knows that it's still in her mind. He picks up on small details that he wishes he'd seen over the last two years. He notices that sometimes her stomach gives a small jump under his hand when he rests his hand there to sleep and that almost immediately afterwards she'll turn to face him so the hand falls to the small of her back instead. He notices that when she suffers from her cramps that she doesn't hide it as much as she used to, that some nights they hurt her so much that she allows him to rub her hips or her back to help her to sleep. He notices that she wakes up every two hours, even if it's just to adjust her position or to look around her, because part of her body is telling her that she should be waking up for other reasons. He notices that she sometimes spots a woman with a child in the street and stiffens her arms around herself as if they feel empty.

He knows that she hates herself for losing her child more than anything else that she dislikes herself for. She considers her body so much a finely tuned killer that it refused to allow the life she was growing to live.

But the third anniversary they spent together. He's given her a year to run, a year to hide, and this year they'll spend it together and they'll grieve for the loss that only they feel. They were invited to give a speech, Steve always is on this anniversary, because no one's hear breaks like the face of America on a day of national mourning, but Clint arranged a 'mission' to excuse them from it and they have the whole of Stark Tower's upper quarters to themselves.

They find each other on the roof, and she's not at all surprised to see that he's beaten her too it. The city is almost silent because of the date, because of the mourning, and she's never felt more detached from America than she has on this day, even before she had her own reason to grieve. Her grief is not the same as the wives who lost husbands, of the children who lost parents, of the families who got the last "I love you" phone calls as the planes crashed, and the only association she can find between herself and this day is that none of them knew it was going to happen until it was too late to stop it.

"Three years old," Clint says as she stands beside him, his eyes still trained on the city grey with mourning and oncoming rain.

She grips the railing that his hands are hanging over and shakes her head. "But not really."

The sigh that follows is one that she's used to, a soft frustration. "Tasha..."

"He's not here, Clint"

The words burn on her own tongue, sending the warmth up to dampen her eyes as he shakes his head. "Nat, come on," he tells her tiredly. "You don't have to do this with me. Not today."

"I don't have anyone else to do it with," she said with such an emotionless tone that his head whips up.

"I lost him too, okay? You're not the only one who lost him!"

She's taken aback because he's snapped at her, and this is the one topic that he's always shown patience for. His reaction doesn't get any physical response from her, but she's always shut things away when they hurt and this one shouldn't be any different. All she knows is that when she tries to close the lid on this one it fights back a bit more than the other painful memories. But she stays silent when he snaps because he is right. She miscarried their child but she wasn't the only one who suffered the loss. Clint lost his son too. Clint had to help her when she was in pain, had to stay with her and wait while she was too delirious to know what was happening. Clint had to go back to his room and clean up the blood and Clint lost his son. Their son.

"I'm sorry," he mumbles moments after, sighing and lowering his head to rest on the hands that are still dangling from the railing. "Today is..."

"Today is hard," she finished for him quietly. "I know."

He sighs again, clearly fighting with himself. "We should be throwing a birthday party right now."

She looks out at the dank, deserted city and shakes her head. "It seems like an inappropriate day for a birthday party."

"But it's still his birthday," he argued weakly, already knowing he'd lost this argument.

She chokes on the words as they leave her lips. "Birthdays are for people who are born, Clint." Of course, he said nothing to that. What could he say? "I'm so sorry," she whispered, but the words echoed into the empty rooftop anyway.

"No, you're right," he mumbles. "It was stupid to say-"

"No, I mean I'm sorry for...losing him."

Finally he turns to her, and she can see his eyes turned grey from the pain that this day brings them. "Nat, it wasn't your fault," he tells her softly.

"But it was," she insists simply. "My body rejected him, Clint. Mine."

"It was an accident-"

"But it wasn't," she cut him off. He'd told her that in the infirmary right after, but she hadn't believed him then. "Some part of my body saw him as a threat, as something to be destroyed."

"Nat"

"I killed our son."

His hands flexed quickly and forced himself up from the railing, hands now gripping her shoulders tightly. She could see the tears in his eyes this close, and how desperately he was trying to keep them from spilling out. "Don't ever say that again," he growled. "Ever."

She shook her head, her own emotions rising despite her best efforts to keep them within. "If you'd gotten anyone else pregnant, your son would still be alive."

"My son wouldn't mine if he wasn't yours as well," he tells her, letting out a single choked sound. "God, Nat, families are big things to consider. You know how much it took for us to plan a life that involved him in it, and I wouldn't do that for just anyone. I did it for you and for him. My family," he stumbled over the word, his face crumpling on the word he'd avoided since the day they lost their child. "You're still my family, Tasha..."

"But I-"

"We lost our baby," he spoke over her, before she could blame herself again. "And it was horrible, and it hurt more than any bullet wound we've had, but it happens all over the world. It happened to us, but that doesn't mean we're any less deserving of a family than anyone else."

"Everyone we've killed..." she sighed. "We don't deserve something so innocent."

Clint shakes his head, one hand moving from her shoulder to her cheek. "That's not how the world works."

But she wants that to be the reason. She wants to believe that her child was taken from her because she was a bad person and because she's a hired killer who's shed blood five times before breakfast. She wants to believe that bad things happen to bad people because there's no justice in a world that takes unborn children from people who are deserving of family and there's certainly no reason to kill a child so innocent it hasn't tasted its own oxygen yet. She wants to believe that there's a world for hired assassins to raise the baby they didn't mean to conceive but stood by anyway, but she can't believe that because for whatever plans they made, they don't have the child they prepared for.

So she leans forward, resigning herself to the fact that he's gone and buries her face into the neck of the man still with her. Her hands ball up into fists against his shirt and she clings to him like he's the only safe harbour in a storm. "I keep waiting for it to stop hurting, and it doesn't," she murmurs into his skin, the words muffled and barely understandable through the crack in her tone.

One of his arms wraps around her back, crushing her to him as the other hand moves from her cheek to bury in her hair, the movement keeps her against his shoulder and even if she had tried to move away from him she couldn't have. "I know," he tries to whisper, but he's so close to tears himself he's not at all sure how comforting the words are. "Me too."

"It's like I'm waiting for someone to bring my baby to hold and no one's bringing him to me."

The words cut through him more than the feel of her tears on his shoulder and it breaks him too. His tears fall into her hair as hers spread into the fabric of his jacket collar and they're silent for a moment, sharing the trembling breaths that keep them both from turning the tears into sobs.

"Tasha..." he chokes out after a moment, letting the unspoken sentence die on his tongue because really, no words can take away their pain. Because three years on feels just as painful as three hours after.

"We could have done it," she tells him.

He nods into her hair. "I know, we would have done it."

"We could have been happy."

He pulls away some to look at her, briefly brushing his lips against her forehead. "We can still be happy," he tells her. "It went badly once, that doesn't mean it'll happen again."

She says nothing to that offer, because she knows what it is that he's telling her. He's telling her, quite simply, that the house in Chicago is still there in their name, that their financial backup is still in place, that they could disappear in the night with nothing but a phone call to Fury to resign. He's telling her that they could erase their ledgers with all their red and they could start fresh in a world where celebrating a third birthday party wouldn't involve them sharing their tears over the candles that won't get blown out. Together.

"Just say the word," he whispers to her, ignoring the soft drizzles of rain that start to fall upon them. "Say the word, and we'll do it."

And she looks up at the man before her, her best friend, her partner, her lover, her everything, and the world slides into the place. Because he was there when she shut away the world, because he didn't lose his head when he woke up that night and found the blood. He carried her to the infirmary and stayed with her. He destroyed the evidence of their loss before she had to go back to it. He gave her the space she needed to build up her strength again but at night knew the darkness would swallow them up and he would wrap his arms around her whether she turned to him or not.

And because he was there. He was there in the increasingly pouring rain, still making her believe that there was a way to move on from this. He was telling her that she could still have a life beyond loss and that she could have that with him. He wasn't turning his back on her, or forcing her to deal with loss alone. He was embracing her, helping her, and she found the idea of not being alone for the remainder of her life wasn't as terrifying as she thought it might be. Not when it meant sharing it with someone who knew how she liked her coffee, knew that she always slept facing the door, and knew that on September 11th, some losses were more personal than others.

"O...okay."

The word was whispered before her mind even processed what she was saying.

"Okay?" he repeated.

She nodded. "Okay."

He nodded along with her, his eyes not as damp as before though her cheeks felt different. "Okay," he whispered again, his voice softer and then his lips were on hers as they should have been hours ago, gentle and soothing, so softly she barely felt them part. "Okay," he repeated. "We'll try. We'll try, and if it doesn't work, at least we'll have tried. And we'll be careful this time. No missions, we'll get jobs in security or something, consultants, something safe, no chance of you getting hurt. We'll take all the precautions we need to and-"

He stops talking, or rather rambling, as her lips pressed to his again, silencing the words he'd clearly been holding to for some time. She mumbles an 'okay' against his lips several more times before the rain drives them inside. It takes them an hour to pack up the few belongings that they have and only two minutes to write their resignation, which they email from JARVIS's mainframe. And one hour and ten minutes later, they're in the car and driving away from New York, away from SHIELD, away from Hawkeye and Black Widow to attempt a new life as Clint and Natasha.


End file.
